In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (43 page)

Were she to encounter Françoise at the moment (which Françoise
called 'the noon') when, wearing her fine cap and surrounded with every
mark of respect, she was coming downstairs to 'feed with the service,'
Mme. Villeparisis would stop her to ask after us. And Françoise, when
transmitting to us the Marquise's message: "She said to me, 'You'll be
sure and bid them good day,' she said," counterfeited the voice of
Mme. de Villeparisis, whose exact words she imagined herself to be
quoting textually, whereas she was really corrupting them no less
than Plato corrupts the words of Socrates or Saint John the words of
Jesus. Françoise, as was natural, was deeply touched by these
attentions. Only she did not believe my grandmother, but supposed that
she must be lying in the interest of her class (the rich always
combining thus to support one another) when she assured us that Mme.
de Villeparisis had been lovely as a young woman. It was true that of
this loveliness only the faintest trace remained, from which no
one—unless he happened to be a great deal more of an artist than
Françoise—would have been able to restore her ruined beauty. For in
order to understand how beautiful an elderly woman can once have been
one must not only study but interpret every line of her face.

"I must remember, some time, to ask her whether I'm not right, after
all, in thinking that there is some connexion with the Guermantes,"
said my grandmother, to my great indignation. How could I be expected
to believe in a common origin uniting two names which had entered my
consciousness, one through the low and shameful gate of experience,
the other by the golden gate of imagination?

We had several times, in the last few days, seen driving past us in a
stately equipage, tall, auburn, handsome, with a rather prominent
nose, the Princesse de Luxembourg, who was staying in the
neighbourhood for a few weeks. Her carriage had stopped outside the
hotel, a footman had come in and spoken to the manager, had gone back
to the carriage and had reappeared with the most amazing armful of
fruit (which combined in a single basket, like the bay itself,
different seasons) with a card: "La Princesse de Luxembourg," on which
were scrawled a few words in pencil. For what princely traveller
sojourning here
incognito
, could they be intended, those glaucous
plums, luminous and spherical as was at that moment the circumfluent
sea, transparent grapes clustering on a shrivelled stick, like a fine
day in autumn, pears of a heavenly ultramarine? For it could not be on
my grandmother's friend that the Princess had meant to pay a call.
And yet on the following evening Mme. de Villeparisis sent us the
bunch of grapes, cool, liquid, golden; plums too and pears which we
remembered, though the plums had changed, like the sea at our
dinner–hour, to a dull purple, and on the ultramarine surface of the
pears there floated the forms of a few rosy clouds. A few days later
we met Mme. de Villeparisis as we came away from the symphony concert
that was given every morning on the beach. Convinced that the music to
which I had been listening (the Prelude to
Lohengrin
, the Overture
to
Tannhäuser
and suchlike) expressed the loftiest of truths, I was
trying to elevate myself, as far as I could, so as to attain to a
comprehension of them, I was extracting from myself so as to
understand them, and was attributing to them, all that was best and
most profound in my own nature at that time.

Well, as we came out of the concert, and, on our way back to the
hotel, had stopped for a moment on the 'front,' my grandmother and I,
for a few words with Mme. de Villeparisis who told us that she had
ordered some
croque–monsieurs
and a dish of creamed eggs for us at
the hotel, I saw, a long way away, coming in our direction, the
Princesse de Luxembourg, half leaning upon a parasol in such a way as
to impart to her tall and wonderful form that slight inclination, to
make it trace that arabesque dear to the women who had been beautiful
under the Empire, and knew how, with drooping shoulders, arched backs,
concave hips and bent limbs, to make their bodies float as gently as a
silken scarf about the rigidity of the invisible stem which might be
supposed to have been passed diagonally through them. She went out
every morning for a turn on the beach almost at the time when everyone
else, after bathing, was climbing home to luncheon, and as hers was
not until half past one she did not return to her villa until long
after the hungry bathers had left the scorching 'front' a desert. Mme.
de Villeparisis presented my grandmother and would have presented me,
but had first to ask me my name, which she could not remember. She
had, perhaps, never known it, or if she had must have forgotten years
ago to whom my grandmother had married her daughter. My name, when
she did hear it, appeared to impress Mme. de Villeparisis
considerably. Meanwhile the Princesse de Luxembourg had given us her
hand and, now and again, while she conversed with the Marquise, turned
to bestow a kindly glance on my grandmother and myself, with that
embryonic kiss which we put into our smiles when they are addressed to
a baby out with its 'Nana.' Indeed, in her anxiety not to appear to be
a denizen of a higher sphere than ours, she had probably miscalculated
the distance there was indeed between us, for by an error in
adjustment she made her eyes beam with such benevolence that I could
see the moment approaching when she would put out her hand and stroke
us, as if we were two nice beasts and had poked our heads out at her
through the bars of our cage in the Gardens. And, immediately, as it
happened, this idea of caged animals and the Bois de Boulogne received
striking confirmation. It was the time of day at which the beach is
crowded by itinerant and clamorous vendors, hawking cakes and sweets
and biscuits. Not knowing quite what to do to shew her affection for
us, the Princess hailed the next that came by; he had nothing left but
one rye–cake, of the kind one throws to the ducks. The Princess took
it and said to me: "For your grandmother." And yet it was to me that
she held it out, saying with a friendly smile, "You shall give it to
her yourself!" thinking that my pleasure would thus be more complete
if there were no intermediary between myself and the animals. Other
vendors came up; she stuffed my pockets with everything that they had,
tied up in packets, comfits, sponge–cakes, sugar–sticks. "You will eat
some yourself," she told me, "and give some to your grandmother," and
she had the vendors paid by the little Negro page, dressed in red
satin, who followed her everywhere and was a nine days' wonder upon
the beach. Then she said good–bye to Mme. de Villeparisis and held
out her hand to us with the intention of treating us in the same way
as she treated her friend, as people whom she knew, and of bringing
herself within our reach. But this time she must have reckoned our
level as not quite so low in the scale of creation, for her and our
equality was indicated by the Princess to my grandmother by that
tender and maternal smile which a woman gives a little boy when she
says good–bye to him as though to a grown–up person. By a miraculous
stride in evolution, my grandmother was no longer a duck or an
antelope, but had already become what the anglophil Mme. Swann would
have called a 'baby.' Finally, having taken leave of us all, the
Princess resumed her stroll along the basking 'front,' curving her
splendid shape which, like a serpent coiled about a wand, was
interlaced with the white parasol patterned in blue which Mme. de
Luxembourg held, unopened, in her hand. She was my first Royalty—I
say my first, for strictly speaking Princesse Mathilde did not count.
The second, as we shall see in due course, was to astonish me no less
by her indulgence. One of the ways in which our great nobles, kindly
intermediaries between commoners and kings, can befriend us was
revealed to me next day when Mme. de Villeparisis reported: "She
thought you quite charming. She is a woman of the soundest judgment,
the warmest heart. Not like so many Queens and people! She has real
merit." And Mme. de Villeparisis went on in a tone of conviction, and
quite thrilled to be able to say it to us: "I am sure she would be
delighted to see you again."

But on that previous morning, after we had parted from the Princesse
de Luxembourg, Mme. de Villeparisis said a thing which impressed me
far more and was not prompted merely by friendly feeling.

"Are you," she had asked me, "the son of the Permanent Secretary at
the Ministry? Indeed! I am told your father is a most charming man. He
is having a splendid holiday just now."

A few days earlier we had heard, in a letter from Mamma, that my
father and his friend M. de Norpois had lost their luggage.

"It has been found; as a matter of fact, it was never really lost, I
can tell you what happened," explained Mme. de Villeparisis, who,
without our knowing how, seemed to be far better informed than
ourselves of the course of my father's travels. "I think your father
is now planning to come home earlier, next week, in fact, as he will
probably give up the idea of going to Algeçiras. But he is anxious to
devote a day longer to Toledo; it seems, he is an admirer of a pupil
of Titian,—I forget the name—whose work can only be seen properly
there."

I asked myself by what strange accident, in the impartial glass
through which Mme. de Villeparisis considered, from a safe distance,
the bustling, tiny, purposeless agitation of the crowd of people whom
she knew, there had come to be inserted at the spot through which she
observed rhy father a fragment of prodigious magnifying power which
made her see in such high relief and in the fullest detail everything
that there was attractive about him, the contingencies that were
obliging him to return home, his difficulties with the customs, his
admiration for El Greco, and, altering the scale of her vision, shewed
her this one man so large among all the rest quite small, like that
Jupiter to whom Gustave Moreau gave, when he portrayed him by the side
of a weak mortal, a superhuman stature.

My grandmother bade Mme. de Villeparisis good–bye, so that we might
stay and imbibe the fresh air for a little while longer outside the
hotel, until they signalled to us through the glazed partition that
our luncheon was ready. There were sounds of tumult. The young
mistress of the King of the Cannibal Island had been down to bathe and
was now coming back to the hotel.

"Really and truly, it's a perfect plague: it's enough to make one
decide to emigrate!" cried the barrister, who had happened to cross
her path, in a towering rage.

Meanwhile the solicitor's wife was following the bogus Queen with eyes
that seemed ready to start from their sockets.

"I can't tell you how angry Mme. Blandais makes me when she stares
at those people like that," said the barrister to the chief
magistrate, "I feel I want to slap her. That is just the way to make
the wretches appear important; and of course that's the very thing
they want, that people should take an interest in them. Do ask her
husband to tell her what a fool she's making of herself. I swear I
won't go out with them again if they stop and gape at those
masqueraders."

As to the coming of the Princesse de Luxembourg, whose carriage, on
the day on which she left the fruit, had drawn up outside the hotel,
it had not passed unobserved by the little group of wives, the
solicitor's, the barrister's and the magistrate's, who had for some
time past been most concerned to know whether she was a genuine
Marquise and not an adventuress, that Mme. de Villeparisis whom
everyone treated with so much respect, which all these ladies were
burning to hear that she did not deserve. Whenever Mme. de
Villeparisis passed through the hall the chief magistrate's wife, who
scented irregularities everywhere, would raise her eyes from her
'work' and stare at the intruder in a way that made her friends die of
laughter.

"Oh, well, you know," she explained with lofty condescension, "I
always begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman
is properly married until she has shewn me her birth certificate and
her marriage lines. But there's no need to alarm yourselves; just
wait till I've finished my little investigation."

And so, day after day the ladies would come together, and, laughingly,
ask one another: "Any news?"

But on the evening after the Princesse de Luxembourg's call the
magistrate's wife laid a finger on her lips.

"I've discovered something."

"Oh, isn't Mme. Poncin simply wonderful? I never saw anyone…. But
do tell us! What has happened?"

"Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint
on her face and a carriage like a—you could
smell
it a mile off;
which only a creature like that would dare to have—came here to–day
to call on the Marquise, by way of!"

"Oh–yow–yow! Tut–tut–tut–tut. Did you ever! Why, it must be that woman
we saw—you remember, Leader,—we said at the time we didn't at all
like the look of her, but we didn't know that it was the 'Marquise'
she'd come to see. A woman with a nigger–boy, you mean?"

"That's the one."

"D'you mean to say so? You don't happen to know her name?"

"Yes, I made a mistake on purpose; I picked up her card; she
trades
under the name of the 'Princesse de Luxembourg!' Wasn't I right to
have my doubts about her? It's a nice thing to have to mix
promiscuously with a Baronne d'Ange like that?" The barrister quoted
Mathurin Régnier's
Macette
to the chief magistrate.

It must not, however, be supposed that this misunderstanding was
merely temporary, like those that occur in the second act of a farce
to be cleared up before the final curtain. Mme. de Luxembourg, a niece
of the King of England and of the Emperor of Austria, and Mme. de
Villeparisis, when one called to take the other for a drive, did look
like nothing but two 'old trots' of the kind one has always such
difficulty in avoiding at a watering place. Nine tenths of the men of
the Faubourg Saint–Germain appear to the average man of the middle
class simply as alcoholic wasters (which, individually, they not
infrequently are) whom, therefore, no respectable person would dream
of asking to dinner. The middle class fixes its standard, in this
respect, too high, for the feelings of these men would never prevent
their being received with every mark of esteem in houses which it, the
middle class, may never enter. And so sincerely do they believe that
the middle class knows this that they affect a simplicity in speaking
of their own affairs and a tone of disparagement of their friends,
especially when they are 'at the coast,' which make the
misunderstanding complete. If, by any chance, a man of the fashionable
world is kept in touch with 'business people' because, having more
money than he knows what to do with, he finds himself elected chairman
of all sorts of important financial concerns, the business man who at
last sees a nobleman worthy, he considers, to rank with 'big
business,' would take his oath that such a man can have no dealings
with the Marquis ruined by gambling whom the said business man
supposes to be all the more destitute of friends the more friendly he
makes himself. And he cannot get over his surprise when the Duke,
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the colossal undertaking,
arranges a marriage for his son with the daughter of that very
Marquis, who may be a gambler but who bears the oldest name in France,
just as a Sovereign would sooner see his son marry the daughter of a
dethroned King than that of a President still in office. That is to
say, the two worlds take as fantastic! a view of one another as the
inhabitants of a town situated at one end of Balbec Bay have of the
town at the other end: from Rivebelle you can just see Marcouville
l'Orgueilleuse; but even that is deceptive, for you imagine that you
are seen from Marcouville, where, as a matter of fact, the splendours
of Rive–belle are almost wholly invisible.